Lost Omens: Darklands needs to be a thing. To echo my post from the Vaultlines thread in the adventure path subforum:
When I started my Sky King's Tomb campaign it was a real pain in the ass to find information about the Darklands in Golarion. It's especially bad now that we live in a post-OGL world where drow, neothelids, and intellect devourers are no longer a thing. Sure, the adventures tells you enough about them to let you run them as is, but I am a GM who loves to expand the story as we go. And the lack of Darklands material has really given me a headache when I was trying to do that for Sky King's Tomb. Especially since the most prominent ancestry in all the old lore books have been erased from the setting. Sure, I could go the suggested route from the Book 3 Darklands Gazetteer and say "It's all snakemen now!" but one of my players really wanted to play a Darklands Elf, and I have no lore about the Ayndilar to share with them for that.
So please, John Paizo, put a Lost Omens: Darklands on the docket.
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What If... the elves who parted from the Jinin people did not become the Ayindilar but rather cousins of them who ended up building Zirnakaynin and becoming close to what the drows were.
Some terrible ritual gone awry might have ensured the annihilation of the city's people except for a few who were outside at the time.
And your player's PC is one of their descendents. Maybe trying to discover what happened to his people.
My favorite hypothesis : these quasi-drows were losing vast territories to the Sekmin and in desperation reached through the infamous Fourth Wall of IP and contacted drows from another setting to get help and reverse their fortune.
The Sekmin found out about this, arrived in time to stop the ritual and close the portal that connected to the Coast of the Wizards. They then exterminated all the city's inhabitants and forbade access to the area.
And, much later, the haunting memories of the place boosted by the ritual's energies intruded on Koriah Azmeren's memories.
It is only after she was caught in the Godsrain that their power was disrupted and the truth of Koriah Azmeren's real discoveries came out.
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IIRC in the stream announcing Vaultlines one of the people there mentioned it was designed around playing Darklands natives, so I presume there will be some way to do that besides just Ysoki and Cavern Elves. Though I'm not entirely sure if this means there will eventually be a LO Darklands book with character options, or if they'll go the Mythspeaker route of suggesting ways to reflavor existing ancestries into the ones you need in the Player's Guide. Personally I'd really love to see a proper book though, especially post-remaster.
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Well, besides ysoki and cavern elves, surki, fleshwarps, umbral gnomes, fungus leshies, deep orcs, dwarves, and kobolds are all playable Darklands ancestries currently.
I get that a lot of the prominent Darklands ancestries aren't playable but I don't really see Paizo making playable xulgaths or serpentfolk anytime soon. I would like to see playable caligni though.
Creative Director
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IIRC neothelids are going to be returning as well and renamed something closer to the seugathi they spawn, rule over, and eat. The Pathfinder neothelid is pretty different from the D&D neothelid, aside from the name, which to be honest never quite fit them in my eyes.
I HAVE put some thought into this, and with a VERY LARGE ASTERISK that nothing said here is anything more than potential rumination and isn't anythign close to a promise...
...My plan for the previously-called-neothleids is to rename them, rebuild their stats, keep them at the same level, and present them as giant enormous seugathis who go all-in on worshiping the Elder Mythos stuff to lean in to the idea that the Dominion of the Black (AKA xoarians and Ilvarandin) don't get along with the "Cthulhus" (AKA the once-known-as-neothelids and Denebrum).
But the stats for the neothelid itself, apart from remaining the same level as its previous CR, will be entirely reworked into something more load-bearing for their role in Golarion.
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I get that a lot of the prominent Darklands ancestries aren't playable but I don't really see Paizo making playable xulgaths or serpentfolk anytime soon. I would like to see playable caligni though.
For my home game I think I suggested to my players that they reflavour Fetchlings to be Caligni, Athamaru to be Ulat-Kini, Nagaji as Serpentfolk, and lizardfolk as Xulgath. It is by no means a perfect solution, but it works. Oh, and for those ancestries that didn't have darkvision innate I let them have it. I should probably have made a specific heritage, but it is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
I know this isn't the main point of your post, and I too really, really, REALLY want a Darklands book--mostly because I love the Darklands, and also want playable Caligni--but intellect devourers do still exist in the setting. They're called xoarians now, with the epithet of "corpse rider," and have been folded into the Dominion of the Black more fully.
In my original draft of my post I had written a sentence to acknowledge that some of those pre-OGL creatures have been simply renamed. But that sentence was lost during one of my rewrites. Still, my main point was that there currently isn't an easy way to learn this lore without scouring the various books both new and old. And so a Lost Omens: Darklands book is desperately needed to address this issue.
And your player's PC is one of their descendents. Maybe trying to discover what happened to his people.
Oh, my (at this point, heavily) homebrewed Sky King's Tomb campaign is well underway at this point. We're at the tail end of Book 2. I ended up trying to marry the old lore about Drow's existing with the new lore about Ayndilar by having the two share a similar origin (Elves fled into the Darklands to escape the destruction of the surface) but then split on their ideology on how to handle living in the Darklands. Drow deciding to go full "survival of the fittest" mode and "the end justify the means" kind of mentality when it comes to what they are willing to do. Whereas the Ayndilar are trying to hide and make hidden settlements that isolate themselves from the horror of the Darklands. And their skin colour change is just the natural "elves will gradually adjust to their surroundings" kind of thing instead of the "elves who are evil are cursed by the higher powers to be dark-skinned".
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I mean we always needed a Darklands book since the main general Darklands setting book was 3.5 book :D
But now with remaster, there is extra good excuses for Paizo really to flesh out Darklands and also build hooks for Darklands under other continents of Golarion as well